I have been trying to get some usb microscopes (QX5 and/or Ken-a-vision) to work on the xo for the last year. I have not been able to get them to work. I have tried it on the xo with sugar and with Ubuntu, and now I sprung for the Enlightenment SD card,but still can't get them to work. Any help would be great.

Thanks! Unfortunately, /var/log/message has nothing for the USB. The only thing of interest is that the SD card you have isn't being recognized. But that has nothing to do with the USB problem at hand.

As for lsmod, I see that usbhid is installed, which is possibly what your microscope could use as a driver. Otherwise, there's nothing telling of which driver it may be using. I would ask what chipset the device is, but that's exactly what I was hoping /var/log/messages would tell me.

There is one (two) other things to try to gather more info:(remove USB device)# sudo dmesg -c(insert USB device)# sudo dmesg

The first one dumps the current kernel debug messages, and then clears it. We're not interested in what happened before. The second one dumps it again, and it should have captured any activity associated with the insertion.

The (second) option is to use lspci to see what devices have registered. But I don't remember if lspci comes with the XO build. So that may be out.

Thirdly, would it be possible to list the model of the usb device? Chipset model would be most ideal. But microscope model may be sufficient to google against to find which driver may be your match.

Thanks I tried the # sudo dmesg -cn work, but no luck. I have sent out an e-mail to try and get the chipset information from the manufacturer. Imagine what it could do for pathogenic detection if we can get a digital microscope to work with the XO. Even if it just gets people in developing counties to have a better understanding about microscopic organisms in drinking water. Thanks for your help.

The manual given on the site you provided says there are two different software packages. Ken-a-Vision is for PC's only. The more advanced package AV4 appears to be usable on PC, Mac, Unix, and Linux. Both can be downloaded from their site. Can you download it directly to the XO ?

I see that you have a cdrom attached to your XO for loading software. How did the software install (error messages) ? What do you get when you run the software per the manual ? Blank screen ?

Apparently, the microsope is just a usb web cam like on the XO. The drivers must be rather generic since the manual says it is compatible with interactive whiteboards. (The use of XO interactive whiteboards over a jabber is a topic I must explore in the future.) So, it is just a webcam mated with its software to view. Could there be conflicts with XO camera ? --- do not know.

The usbhid is just the usb mouse (human interface device).

The drivers ohci_hcd (open host controller interface) and ehci_hcd are usb modules. There are lots of articles (google) that report problems (bug) with ehci_hcd with USB 2.0 devices. Reported fixes are to remove it with modprobe -r ehci_hcd.

This is the response I got from Ken-a-vision. I am working on the install. I will let you know what happens..

Thanks everyone.

"Troy,We do not currently have a software for Linux but it is in development. But I suppose you could use wine. This is a program that allows you to run Windows applications on your Linux OS. Here is a URL to the website about that http://www.winehq.org/download

But the Kena is UVC which means it will work on most every operating system (Linux included). If the wine application is too much just to install our software, any open source video capture software should work for this unit."